The politics of Arctic international cooperation: Introducing a dataset on stakeholder participation in Arctic Council meetings,1998–2015

Dataset

This novel dataset on STAPAC covers all nine Ministerial meetings, 34 SAO meetings, 18 AMAP, 24 EPPR, 29 PAME and 32 SDWG meetings that took place in the period from 1998, after the first Ministerial meeting in Iqaluit took place and at which the first observers were officially admitted, until 2015. Furthermore, the five meetings of the Task Force on Arctic Marine Oil Pollution Prevention (TFOPP) and the six meetings of the Task Force on Black Carbon and Methane (TFBCM) held between 2013 and 2014 are included. Other Task Forces, Expert Groups and the two other WGs, ACAP and CAFF, are excluded due to poor data availability.

Meeting protocols and participant lists for all bodies covered in STAPAC were accessed between September 2014 and December 2015, either through the Arctic Council online document archive or those of the WGs. ⁴ Some additional documents have been provided by members of Arctic Council WGs or delegations upon request. No information was available for two Ministerial (1998 and 2006) and three SAO meetings (in 2006, 2013 and 2015). With regard to subsidiary bodies, records for all stakeholders were found for the large majority of gatherings with all AMAP, PAME, TFOPP and TFBCM meetings being covered, followed by EPPR (96 per cent), and SDWG (75 per cent) meetings.

The dataset uses attendance records as a proxy for participation behaviour of the eight member states, six PPs and 32 observers admitted over the past 20 years. Due to current practice in the Arctic Council to treat the European Union (EU) as an ‘observer in principle’, despite the fact that its application for observer status has been deferred four times since 2009 (Hossain, 2015), also the EU is considered for the entire period in the dataset, but is listed separately from the other observers in the analysis below. ⁵ Attendance was coded as a binary variable with 1 for ‘attended’, meaning that a delegation consisting of at least one official representative on behalf of that actor was present, and 0 for ‘not attended’ when the actor had no representative at that meeting. With the exception of the EU, participation was measured from the Ministerial meeting at which an actor officially joined the Arctic Council as a member state, PP or accredited observer in accordance with the Council’s Rules of Procedure (cf. Figure 1). Where participation of an actor could not be properly verified by official documentation, that particular observation was given no value. Not taken into account were attendances as ad hoc observer and invited guest before official accreditation or by other actors. Both statuses are highly selective and informal gateways to participate in individual meetings and only at the discretion of the Council or WG Chair, so they do not allow for systematic comparison over time. ⁶

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Figure 1.

Development of actor categories in the Arctic Council, 1996–2015.

Based on this selection scheme, a total number of 5722 observations have been made for the 47 actors between 1998 and 2015. With about 75 per cent of the total record, most observations were documented on the subsidiary body level, with 3790 for WGs and 517 for Task Forces. Due to the higher frequency of meetings, the STAPAC dataset also contains almost four times as many observations for SAO (1138) than for Ministerial meetings (277).

General participation patterns

The participation quotas for all actor groups across Arctic Council Ministerial, SAOs, WG and Task Force meetings are summarised in Table 1. Accredited observers were grouped together following the Arctic Council’s own categorisation into non-Arctic states, IGOs and NGOs. The percentages for each type of meeting indicate the quantity of all recorded attendances of members of that group from 1998 to 2015 relative to the total number of meetings for which group members would have been eligible to attend in this period.

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Table 1.

Participation quotas in Arctic Council meetings, 1998–2015 (in per cent).

	Type of meeting				avg.	min.	max.
	Ministerial meetings	SAO meetings	WG meetings	Task Force meetings (2013–2014)
Member states	100.00	100.00	93.92	94.32	95.38	84.56 (Iceland)	99.33 (Canada, USA)
Permanent Participants	97.50	97.63	41.56	34.85	55.01	42.06 (Gwich’in Council International)	71.33 (Inuit Circumpolar Council))
Observer states	86.36	80.22	21.77	27.27	36.09	26.24 (Germany)	68.57 (Republic of Korea)
Observer IGOs	61.36	61.20	13.16	10.39	24.92	1.41 (UN Economic Commission for Europe)	48.61 (UN Environment Programme)
Observer NGOs	61.54	54.43	19.55	5.60	27.17	9.52 (Internat. Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies)	67.36 (World Wide Fund for Nature)
‘Observer in principle’ (EU)	85.71	80.00	33.33	45.45	46.53	–	–

SAO: Senior Arctic Official; WG: Working Group; IGO: intergovernmental and inter-parliamentary organisation; NGO: non-governmental organisation; UN: United Nations; EU: European Union.

Based on this summary, three patterns of STAPAC are striking and require more thorough discussion: (i) across all meeting levels, member states show highest records, followed by PPs and observers; (ii) the lower the meeting level in the Arctic Council system, the lower the participation quotas for all stakeholder groups, with particularly PPs and observers attending significantly fewer subsidiary body meetings than SAO and Ministerial meetings; and (iii) within each stakeholder category, attendance among group members varies significantly.

Regarding participation quotas per stakeholder group, it is little surprise that the member states score highest on all meeting levels. Still, even for them, full presence is the rule only in high-level meetings. Only Canada and the USA have attended all Ministerial, SAO and WG meetings in the entire period. The only minor disruption in their overall records is their boycott of the TFBCM meeting in Moscow in April 2014 in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. All other member states have time and again abstained from subsidiary body meetings. The six PPs show the second-highest quotas on all meeting levels and are almost always present at Ministerial and SAO meetings, although their participation records in WG and Task Force meetings are considerably lower and much closer to those of observers than to those of member states. Among the four observer groups, non-Arctic states and the EU are by far the most active across all meetings, even though, on average, an observer state does only attend every third and the EU every second Council meeting. Observer IGOs and NGOs, on the other hand, show very similar participation patterns and only differ in their behaviour on the subsidiary body level: NGOs attend far more WG meetings than Task Force meetings, while IGOs show an almost equally low interest in both.

If further compared across meeting-level data, the STAPAC dataset discloses extreme variation in stakeholders’ presence across the different levels of the Arctic Council system, which always follow the same pattern: participation quotas for all stakeholder groups are very high in Ministerial meetings, solid for SAO meetings with over 50 per cent for all actor groups, and lowest in subsidiary body meetings. From the circle of observers, non-Arctic states and the EU show the highest records for all four types of meetings and are present in about nine out of 10 cases in Ministerial and eight out of 10 cases in SAO meetings. Observer IGOs and NGOs follow closely and, on average, attend more than half of these high-level meetings, too. Most remarkable here is that, leaving member states aside, attendance records for all other stakeholders systematically collapse in subsidiary bodies, also for indigenous peoples’ organisations. Given the Council’s institutional structure and incentives for observers to contribute primarily at the level of subsidiary body meetings, this finding is far from intuitive.

Not only across actor categories and meetings are variations in attendance records considerable, but also within the stakeholder groups. Even among the Arctic Eight, some states attend far fewer meetings than others, with Iceland having been without a delegation at more than 15 per cent of all meetings between 1998 and 2015. Actors in the other stakeholder groups are even further apart, whilst the six PPs perform better than any of the observer groups. Even though the ICC, the PP with the highest participation quota in the dataset, is only little more present than the most active non-Arctic state (South Korea) and observer NGO (World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)), the range of participation quotas for indigenous peoples’ organisations is much lower than for observers. In other words, more PPs attend Council meetings more frequently, while many observers are literally poles apart. The variation is highest for the group of observer NGOs, where the WWF has attended about 67 per cent of all meetings, whereas the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has only attended about one out of 10 meetings. Among the other observer groups, Germany (observer states) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE; observer IGOs) score particularly low. In the entire period investigated here, representatives of UNECE have only attended two meetings, both of which took place in 2015 (the Ministerial meeting in Iqaluit and the EPPR WG meeting in Longyearbyen).

Participation in Ministerial meetings

It is argued here that participation at Council meetings is a much more adequate way to assess the interest by regional and international stakeholders in Arctic affairs than the number of applications for or admission to Council observer status. With that in mind, analysing participation records across meeting-level data and over time is a helpful tool to also put the Arctic as a ‘contested region’ into perspective. In what follows, this article will do so by pointing towards general trends for the six actor groups, but cannot go into much detail on any individual case.

Figure 2 shows in percentage the number of actors from the group of member states, PPs and accredited observers participating in each Ministerial meeting that took place between 1998 and 2015. As stated further above, Arctic Council Ministerial meetings constitute a platform where all actors meet regularly, and (with the exception of RAIPON at the 2015 Ministerial meeting) all member states and PPs have participated in all of them. For observers, the results are mixed and highly depend on the type of actor. Observer states, at least since 2009, show much greater interest in Ministerial meetings than they did in the years before, when only at the 2002 meeting in Inari all five then-accredited observer states were present. The following 2004 Ministerial meeting in Reykjavik marked a low point for observer states with only the UK sending a delegation. What is striking about the increase in attendance towards full presence of all observer states since 2009 is that the group size has tripled in the period under review, from four state observers in 1998 to 12 in 2013, so that non-Arctic states stand out among all observers as the only group for which enlargement has been paralleled by higher attendance records over time. The EU, in turn, only missed the Reykjavik Ministerial meeting in 2004.

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Figure 2.

Stakeholder participation in Arctic Council Ministerial meetings, 1998–2015.

In stark contrast, observer IGOs and NGOs show much more volatility in attendance irrespective of group size. Their quotas generally vary between 50 and 80 per cent, but different from observer states group enlargement had little effect on the average quotas for the entire group. With more NGOs and IGOs joining the pool of potential participants until the 2004 Reykjavik meeting, also more IGO and NGO observers did not participate in Ministerial meetings since then. Of the 20 non-state actors accredited to the Arctic Council, only the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO), Association of World Reindeer Herders (AWRH), Circumpolar Conservation Union (CCU), the University of the Arctic and the WWF have attended all Ministerial meetings between 1998 and 2015, while at the lower end of the spectrum stand UNECE, the IFRC, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA, formerly Arctic Cultural Gateway/Arctic Circumpolar Route) with only one attendance each. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), on the other hand, has been the only non-state actor without a delegation at any Ministerial meeting.

Participation in SAO meetings

Despite many similarities with Ministerial meetings, there are two notable exceptions worth discussing in more detail regarding stakeholder participation in SAO meetings.

Firstly, while also in SAO meetings observer state participation has been continuously on the rise since the mid-2000s (as has EU presence, with representatives only being absent at the five SAO meetings between 1998 and 2000 and another one in 2004), attendance records of both observer NGOs and IGOs have run counter to this development (see Figure 3). Since 2002, their group quotas have steadily declined and reached new record lows in 2009 and 2013 (NGOs) and 2010 (IGOs). For both actor categories, the absolute number of group members attending has been modest, notwithstanding considerable expansion of both groups. This is the combined result of erratic participation patterns also among newer non-state observers and the abrupt withdrawal of several older ones that were fairly active until the early 2000s, including the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO), the Northern Forum, the Advisory Com-mittee on Protection of the Sea (ACOPS), the International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and IWGIA. In particular, records of NGOs dwindled visibly with three out of four actors in that group attending in the late 1990s and stable levels still in the early 2000s. Since then, on average less than half the members of that group have attended SAO meetings.

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Figure 3.

Stakeholder participation in Arctic Council Senior Arctic Officials’ meetings, 1998–2015.

Secondly, for some unknown reason the relative group quotas of observer IGOs and NGOs, interestingly, are strongly congruent across most meetings and follow similar patterns, meaning that whenever less (or more) IGO observers attended a SAO meeting, so did the number of NGO observers decrease (or increase), and vice versa. In absolute terms, however, more NGOs than IGOs participate in most SAO meetings due to their larger group size.

Even though the participation patterns of non-Arctic states and non-state actors has more and more diverged since the mid-2000s, this disparity did not result in an overrepresentation of state observers as opposed to NGOs and IGOs. Until 2012, the total number of represented NGOs alone outbalanced those of state observers in most years. Only with the accession of the Asian observers and Italy in 2013 did more state observers participate in SAO meetings than IGO and NGO observers combined.

Participation in Working Group and Task Force meetings

On the level of WG and Task Force meetings, participation records of the stakeholder groups move way further apart than they do in Ministerial and SAO meetings (see Figure 4). Observers seldom reach higher participation records than 30 per cent, and this pattern remains constant throughout the entire period with even lower records in past years compared to the years at the turn of the millennium. The EU was quite visible in the Task Force meetings in 2013 and 2014, which coincides with its overall higher activity level in subsidiary bodies in recent years compared to long periods of inactivity in the years before. However, even the Arctic Eight frequently show lower quotas in subsidiary body meetings than they do in high-level meetings, and only in 2000 did all of them participate in all AMAP, EPPR, PAME and SDWG meetings. All states occasionally miss a WG meeting, while much of the variation is caused by Iceland’s absence in the majority of EPPR meetings, where it has sent delegations to only about 30 per cent of the meetings over the entire period.

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Figure 4.

Stakeholder participation in Arctic Council Working Group meetings (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response, Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment, Sustainable Development Working Group), 1998–2015.

For IGO and NGO observers, participation patterns again show similar ups and downs throughout the entire period. Interestingly, though, at this level the same partly goes for observer states and PPs. Furthermore, observer states have not significantly stepped up their presence in WG meetings as they did in Ministerial and SAO meetings in recent years. After a noticeable increase in attendance after the accreditation of six new observer states in 2013, their average group quota has been steadily in decline.

PPs, on the other hand, have had in all years more members of their group represented at WG meetings than did all of the observer groups. Yet, at the same time PPs were unable to maintain the high attendance levels they had up to 2004, when on average at least three out of six PPs were present at WG meetings, with a maximum attendance quota of even 75 per cent across all WG meetings in 1998. These rates have fallen below the level of 50 per cent since 2005, and have only exceeded that level again in the last two years.

Cooperation and conflict

One of the central debates in 21st century Arctic governance revolves around the question of whether the Arctic region, an area of high stability and peaceful cooperation following decades of Cold War antagonism, has re-emerged as a conflict zone in world politics, where international tussle over resources, shipping lanes and territorial expansionism as a consequence of the opening ice cover ‘is bringing with it a hardening of attitude from the eight members of the Arctic Council, the forum where geopolitics becomes geopolarctics’ (Marshall, 2015: 249), and that in a worst-case scenario could ‘erupt in an armed mad dash’ (Borgerson, 2008: 65). The Arctic Council as the primary intermediary for regional cooperation is thereby considered by some commentators to have become more and more a playground for power politics and the struggle over regional hegemony. Even though nightmarish stories of a ‘hot war in a cold climate’ overall remain short on empirical support, fears of a coming Arctic conflict have never entirely faded in media, political and academic debates, and have more recently been fuelled again by two broader developments.

According to the first, the growing international interest in the Arctic implicates a diversification of interests and, hence, multiplies the potential for conflict as new powerful actors enter the Arctic stage. The Financial Times, for instance, reported after the admission of five Asian states at the 2013 Ministerial meeting that

The Arctic Council, a formerly sleepy organisation, has become the centre of geopolitical intrigue as a host of Asian countries headed by China seek to have a say on the future of a region presumed to be rich in natural resources. (Milne, 2013) ⁷

In this line of thought, new actors may try to influence the power structure and agenda of the Arctic Council in their favour, causing fierce opposition by Arctic states and local communities. Such scenarios do not only overestimate observers’ possibilities to leave a mark on Arctic Council decision-making and the role the forum plays as a policy-shaping body in regional affairs, but they also generally approach questions about the status and impact of observers exclusively from the angle of the number of admissions instead of actual participation after access had been granted, arguing that the current ‘ratio of 4 observers for every Member State with decision-making clout is where the potential problem lies’ (Charron, 2014). When analysed from a post-admission perspective, the political reality looks a lot different. In fact, the ratio of four observers to one Arctic state only exists on paper and does not materialise in any Council meeting, neither in Ministerial nor in SAO meetings, and particularly not in subsidiary body meetings. Where the ratio is closest to exist in terms of attendance, that is, in Ministerial and SAO meetings, it probably has the least effect because of the Council’s procedural rules and minimised room for intervention by non-Arctic stakeholders. By and large, the way Arctic Council enlargement has been politicised in recent years is disproportionate to observers’ actual presence as a necessary condition for influencing Council proceedings.

A second prominent argument holds that Arctic discord will likely not be the result of political developments within the region, but of international discord between Arctic stakeholders outside the region spilling over into the Arctic and negatively impacting diplomatic relations. Assertions of such a ripple effect have, among others, been made in the context of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (Galeotti, 2008: 11), sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea (Peng and Wegge, 2014), NATO military exercises in the Baltic Sea region (Haftendorn, 2011: 340–345) and, most firmly, tensions between Russia and the West over the Ukraine crisis that started in the spring of 2014 (Åtland, 2014: 152). In that regard, some scholars took the Canadian and US-American non-attendance at the 2014 meeting of the TFBCM in Moscow as evidence for a creeping change to the worse in Arctic affairs that might lead to a ‘tit for tat between Canada and Russia’ (Käpylä and Mikkola, 2015: 13; see also Regehr, 2014)

The time-series data from the STAPAC dataset does not support the claim of an alleged spill-over effect and, instead, shows that none of these geopolitical events have so far caused any serious or pervasive non-cooperative behaviour in the Arctic Council in the years that followed. International affairs have had almost no effect on member state participation in institutional structures of the Arctic Council over the past almost two decades, with the aforementioned 2014 Task Force meeting in Moscow being the only exception to date. Besides that, Arctic states skip individual subsidiary body meetings occasionally and, even though a qualitative investigation into Arctic states’ behaviour and commitment to Council meetings and projects in times of crisis might add relevant insights to these debates, a long-term perspective on attendance in the Arctic Council reveals that cooperation between member states has always been on high and stable levels and widely unaffected by regional or international geopolitical events. This finding either points to untenable theoretical assumptions or other analytical fallacies in geopolitical forecasts of the inevitability of Arctic conflict (cf. Keil, 2014), or to the unexpected ability of the Arctic Council to resist international conflict lines and to maintain business as usual throughout its history. Either way, the causes and consequences of stable cooperation in the Arctic Council in the light of regional and global disputes over territories, power and resources will require further research.

Observer involvement in the Arctic Council

While ‘business as usual’ is good news for the overall state of political affairs in the Arctic region, it also unveils valuable information about the form and substance of observers’ commitment in Council proceedings. The growing number of non-Arctic observers and the (potential) implications of their presence in the Arctic Council system through the provision of additional resources, expertise and legitimacy to the Council have in recent years sparked a new strand of debate in Arctic governance (Hara and Coates, 2014; Lunde et al., 2015; Solli et al., 2013; Wills et al., 2014).

Widely overseen in previous research has been that new admissions to the Council do not automatically lead to more participation on the part of observers, and that variation in their presence is extremely high across the different observer categories, types of meetings and time. Arctic stakeholders contribute to different degrees and pursue heterogeneous interests and strategies to engage with the Arctic Council.

As a matter of fact, the STAPAC dataset has its limits here as it does not provide any information on how actively observers in fact contribute to Council meetings they are present at, whether they really just ‘observe’ or to what extent and how successful they make use of the participatory rights given to them by the Council. Comparative case studies are possibly better equipped to address these issues with in-depth knowledge of individual cases, and have already brought to light profound insights into the nuances and essential differences of observers’ interests, strategies and impact on Arctic governance (e.g., Stokke, 2014; Śmieszek and Kankaanpää, 2015; Wehrmann, in press). What the STAPAC dataset adds to current research is a more complete picture of stakeholder behaviour in Arctic Council proceedings across time, meetings and the different stakeholder groups involved, which would also allow hypothesis testing about the conditions under which certain actors may or may not contribute to international governance in regional institutions.

At the same time, many studies on Arctic Council observers suffer from selection biases that severely limit our knowledge of their influence on the Arctic Council system and its scientific networks. Most research preselects non-Arctic states for exploring the role and impact of observers, and thereby disregards the plethora of NGOs and IGOs in their entirety. While the status and power of non-Arctic states, such as China, Japan, Germany or the UK, in international politics make them intriguing and highly important cases to investigate in the Arctic context, it still remains an empirical question whether they, in fact, wield more or less influence on Arctic Council governance than highly active non-state observers, such as UNEP, WWF or the University of the Arctic. Furthermore, it has become prevalent in analyses of state observers to distinguish between the ‘old’ European powers and the ‘new’ Asian state observers, and to treat both subsets independently of each other for geographic, historical or geostrategic reasons. Such a case selection considerably reduces variation in need of explanation, since behavioural patterns within the group of European and the group of Asian states are more alike, whereas a cross-group comparison is a path yet to be taken and one that could generate new and highly relevant insights into observer involvement in the Council. The STAPAC database can serve as a useful tool for making a reasoned and empirically founded case selection that is more robust towards selection biases, and to do so from a much broader population of potential cases.

With that said, the dataset opens up a new set of questions and interesting contradictions that have received insufficient attention so far and could be addressed in future research. For instance, how can the large variance in observers’ participation records be explained theoretically and how does it affect the functioning, design and effectiveness of the Council and Arctic governance in general? Why do all observer groups attend significantly less subsidiary body meetings where the Council grants them considerably more participatory rights to help shape Council processes than in high-level Ministerial and SAO meetings where they are forced to stay on the sideline? What are the reasons for observer states and the EU being more active in Task Forces than in WGs, whereas it is the other way around for NGO and IGO observers? Or why is it that the Asian observers admitted in 2013 attend meetings more regularly than many non-state observers and the European states that have been present for much longer in the Arctic Council? How can it be explained that some observers, such as the Netherlands and the WWF, engage in several subsidiary bodies over a longer period of time, while others decide to limit their presence and contributions to not more than one or two WGs or only attend infrequently? And in doing so, how and why do stakeholders prioritise certain WGs and Task Forces over others and how successful are they in influencing their work?

Indigenous peoples’ representation

The growing number of admitted observers has not only implications for the work conducted in the Arctic Council, but further prompted concerns that the role and voice of indigenous peoples in the Council might erode as a direct consequence of enlargement. On several occasions, PPs such as the ICC have expressed their fears ‘to be squeezed and lose their influence to non-Arctic observers’ (Arctic Council, 2010: 4). Maintaining regular and strong indigenous peoples’ representation at the Arctic table has become somewhat of a normative imperative, and for good reason since they are those most directly and strongly affected by changing Arctic conditions and given their right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) adopted in 2007 (United Nations, 2007: Articles 3 and 4). Moreover, PPs contribute to Arctic Council projects and assessment reports with relevant information through community-based monitoring and on-site observations over generations in what has been labelled traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) (Riedlinger and Berkes, 2001; Tennberg, 1996).

Nevertheless, the STAPAC dataset does not support the concern of a marginalisation of indigenous voices in Council proceedings as a result of Council enlargement. PPs’ participation quotas have been at stable levels in all Council meetings since 1998 and are in every year at least as high (and in the case of subsidiary body meetings always higher) than those of all three observer groups. ⁸ Notwithstanding that the three observer groups have extensively grown in size over the years and that, in particular, the new Asian observers are frequent participants across all meeting levels, this has not resulted in an overrepresentation of observers compared to indigenous peoples’ organisations. The group of PPs, operating under scarce financial and staff resources, has the lowest variation in attendance quotas of all stakeholder groups except for the member states. Even the PP with the lowest attendance quota of 42.06 per cent over all meetings, the GCI, has delegations more often at Council meetings than most observers.

Yet, the significantly lower participation of PPs in WG and Task Force meetings, where their representation is vital for the assessment and development of adaptive governance mechanisms in their best interest as residents of Arctic regions, remains a major challenge for future institutional reform and capacity-building of the Council. More than the rising number of observers in the forum, what is increasingly threatening indigenous representation is their ability and capacity to maintain a high level of presence and commitment, particularly on the level of subsidiary bodies, where their quotas are nowhere near those of the member states. This puts indigenous peoples not in a state of underrepresentation in relation to observers, but vis-à-vis the Arctic Eight with which they are supposed to sit at the same table, and ultimately points to the necessity to establish funding mechanisms that secure PPs’ privileged position in the Council (Exner-Pirot, 2015).